We Need 90,000 Jobs Per Month to Keep Pace With the Growth of the Population

In an article on the June employment report the NYT told readers that the economy needs 150,000 jobs per month to keep pace with the growth in the population. Actually, the Congressional Budget Office projects that the underlying rate of labor force growth is now just 0.7 percent annually. This comes to roughly 1,050,000 a year or just under 90,000 a month.

This is fortunate since the economy has created less than 1.8 million jobs in the 16 months since it first began adding jobs again in February of 2010. If we needed to create 150,000 jobs a month then we would have needed 2.4 million jobs to keep even with the growth of the labor force, so we would be considerable further behind where we were in February 2010. As it stands, we are roughly treading water with job growth that has been pretty much even with the growth of the population over this period.